I’m not doing this because I have a burning ambition to write a book – but because I feel like this is a book that needs to exist.

I wrote more about why here, but in a nutshell – after 15+ years of service design as an industry, the fact that we still don’t have a definition of what a good service is is holding us back.

To try and plug this gap we have become collectively obsessed with methodology – it’s now how we sell our wares when our clients ask for any kind of certainty of the outcome of our work. But without a way of explaining to others what it is that we’ll achieve there’s no way we can say anything more reassuring than just ‘trust the process’.

Because of this, we often spend more time convincing the people around us to let us do our jobs than we do designing services.

I’m not against guides on methodology, there are some great ones out there that form a valuable way to get newcomers up to speed, but there is a gaping hole on our collective bookshelves where the answer to the fundamental question of ‘what do we mean by a good service’ should be, and that’s the problem I want to fix.

Some of this is basic – like how we collectively talk about what services are. I wrote a bit about this here back in 2016

Other things are more complicated, like how exactly we understand and set expectations for users. Or how you make your service findable.

The book will be based on the 15 principles which have been open and on the internet for a couple of months and were shared by Fastco back in July.

So far there have been over 2000 contributors to these, so thankyou to everyone who’s given their thoughts, please keep them coming.

I don’t want this book to stop these principles from being a community resource that is owned by the community and changes and grows over time, so the principles will stay under a creative commons licence under ‘Attribution + Share Alike‘. Please adapt them, use them or add to them however you like.

If you’d like to help with the book, let me know. I’ll be looking for contributions and case studies for each principle so if you feel passionately about any of them, or you think the thing you’ve been working on is a great example of one or more principles, let me know (my DM’s are open on Twitter).

I’m excited. It might take a long time to do but it feels like something that needs to happen.